Plawn Motors spreads wings

PLAWN Motors recently opened a new fitment centre and workshop in graniteside, cementing its place among the most renowned in the motor industry.

A journey which started off with a single branch in 2005 in Kaguvi Street, has witnessed an amazing growth with the birth of nine more branches in five major cities in Zimbabwe as well as the head office at 46 Kaguvi, Tselentis Building. e managing director Lawrence Nyabanga in an interview gave snippets of their success story.

"We introduced the strobe shock absorbers into the market in 2016, in four years’ time the brand has quite a significant market share in the country," Nyabanga said.

e company is also the the sole distributor of 111 suspension parts in Zimbabwe.

"We enlarged our product range (introduced motor accessocies, tyres, bars, etc ) as well as opening of the Fitment Centre and Workshop at Graniteside."

To date, Plawn Motors has created 44 permanent jobs as well as several others indirectly

"We are also introducing the Plawn Motors wellbeing initiative targeted at the Plawn company’s employees to deal mainly with mental health issues and general wellbeing of our staff on and off work,"

On corporate social responsibility Plawn Motors partnered with PIF consultancy for the 2019 Christmas Party for Ruvimbo Zimcare Trust School in Harare.

"We also assist with sanitary pads to the same school for the girl child," Nyabanga said.

"We are paying school fees for three of underprivileged children. ey also partnered with Star Brite in their last season of their talent search show."

However, despite the growth, Covid-19 has impacted on the business .

"Disruption of the supply chains that led to massive shortages of stocks in all our branches. And then there is slow movement of people due to enforced lock downs to contain the pandemic."

is was compounded by limited working hours and transport challenges to some of its members of staff who commute on a daily basis.

"We also had some cash flow challenges as we struggle to fulfil our prior arranged commitments due to total shut down. ere is also general loss of business because there was minimum movement of cars. Our business thrive when there is free movement of cars."

To counter these hurdles, Plawn instituted some raft measures, which included introducing organised transport to pick and drop members of staff. ey also rolled out home and workshop deliveries by introducing of a motorbike for the service.

"We engaged in robust ecommerce and social media campaigns and had a system upgrade to enable employees to work from home.

"One thing we are proud of is due to the pandemic we never lost any job instead we employed more people to help especially with the ecommerce part of the business. We opened our Fitment Centre to the public on the 1st of July right in the middle of the pandemic," Nyabanga added.